


A Blinding of the Senses (the malignant growth remix)

by Lets_call_me_Lily



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 1610 - Fandom, Marvel Ultimates
Genre: Captain America/Iron Man Remix 2018, Character Study, Emotionally Repressed Steve Rogers, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Internalized Homophobia, Period Typical Attitudes, Remix, Sexism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-22
Updated: 2018-02-22
Packaged: 2019-03-13 10:39:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13568853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lets_call_me_Lily/pseuds/Lets_call_me_Lily
Summary: Wherein Steve Rogers has Thoughts on the decency of Ultimates team member Antonio Stark's behavior, though he doesn't broach the topic directly.





	A Blinding of the Senses (the malignant growth remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Body Problem (In Articulo Mortis Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13490289) by [navaan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/navaan/pseuds/navaan). 



> This story is nebulously set after Ultimates 1 finishes but sometime before Natasha betrays the Ultimates to the Liberators in Ultimates 2, so at this point in time Natasha Romanov and Antonio Stark are an established, engaged couple, and Steve Roger's attempted relationship with Janet Pym is crumbling. 
> 
> **CW:** Homophobic and sexist sentiments expressed by Steve here. I hesitated a bit with the "period typical attitudes" tag because I know that this sort of headspace wasn't characteristic of everyone in the 1940s, and that unfortunately some people today think this way too... basically, Steve is judgmental, self-righteous, and an asshole.
> 
> This relay is part of a chain; you can find the full [masterlist](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Cap_Ironman_Relay_Remix_2018/profile) on the Collection profile page.  
> 

Steve was not blind. He might be slow to pick up on some things in this new-fangled decade (like tiny computer screens where the slightest touch sent everything into disarray), but he wasn’t unaware that things had changed, massively.

Dames didn’t wait to be courted. They didn't even stay pure until marriage, although the church still preached abstinence. Take a look at Jan—or Antonio Stark and his fiancé, Natasha. The first time they’d met Steve, Natasha had been sitting on Stark’s lap with her red hair covering both their faces as they kissed. Stark’s hand on Natasha’s ass hadn’t helped matters, and his complete disregard for propriety even after he realized someone else was in the room was discomforting. So were the outright pornographic sounds he’d been making. “Come for the show, darling?” Stark’d stopped to leer at Steve, and then got right back to it—seemingly with no objections from Natasha. Crass comments aside, it was clear that those two were known to each other already, in the biblical sense.

Steve tried not to let it bother him so much, but he couldn’t help thinking back on that moment, at the way he’d stumbled over his words in anger and shame and confusion … at the way that neither Stark nor Natasha had seemed bothered to be caught in the act of something Steve considered private. He had mentioned his disapproval about this decade’s open sexualization of, well, everything, but Jan had just shot him down for it and accused him of being repressed. Which he wasn't.

Even more concerning than how men looked at women was the way some men looked at _each other_. He’d grown up in Brooklyn; he’d been witness to furtive glances and walked fast trying to ignore fumbling shadows in dark alleys before he’d been injected with Erskine’s serum. Broad daylight scared away wandering eyes and lingering touches, and insults like “pansy” or “queer”, with their threat of violence, did the rest.

Not any more apparently.

Well—not that there weren’t still insults, or bullying, or beatings—but Steve had walked through the streets of New York and passed men brazenly hold hands with each other, sat opposite women kissing on park benches, seen teenagers exchange meaningful looks full of barefaced lust. Somehow, people had overcome the social stigma imposed on homosexuality; heck, in some places a relationship between two people of the same sex was recognized legally!

It made Steve ill. His gorge rose in disgust at the unnaturalness of people’s degeneracy aired openly and slavered over by the media; their fixation was disturbing. They took events and people in his life and twisted them into something to be spat on. He had done nothing to be condemned for. His affection for Bucky, the comfort he knew some of his covert ops cohort had derived from each other during those long months fighting the Nazis; those were simply marks of strong friendships. None of the soldiers he’d met had planned anything except finding a nice girl when the war was over and marrying her, if they didn’t already have one waiting a home. Steve himself had Gail—had had Gail, now she was Bucky’s girl—and he’d always tried to concentrate on their reunion at the end of the war, on what their future together would look like when he needed that extra bit of warmth at night.

In the end, Steve trusted his gut, and his gut churned every time he heard the word “gay” on the television.

So he uncomfortably ignored the way the internet seemed to grab him as an icon and that people, both men and women, would nudge each other and wiggle their eyebrows in some sort of illicit code as he went grocery shopping in plainclothes. He said no comment a lot to the media as Captain America and emphasized his attraction to women among his S.H.I.E.L.D. cohorts. The one thing he couldn’t seem to overlook was Stark's behavior.

Not only did Stark feel the need to draw everyone's attention to his upcoming nuptials and gorgeous fiancé in the most lurid way possible, but he delighted in flirting with Steve. Every time he walked into a room that contained Steve, he'd pause for a moment to "take in the view and be inspired", according to a comment Steve had overheard. And every time it was Steve entering the scene, be it at S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters or on an Ultimates mission, he could feel Stark's eyes rake over him in the uniform.

“Aren't you getting married, Stark?” Thor asked once during a formal event, echoing a moral judgement Steve had made in his thoughts more than once, though not as amiably as Thor's deep voice seemed to imply. Steve'd just caught Stark eyeing him up again, and so he kept an ear out as he got up and strode in the opposite direction. Out the corner of his eye, he saw Tony grin. "Natasha gets this,” he'd replied.

What was there to get about persistent hands and looks so sensual it felt like Steve was being groped? Not to mention the casually tossed endearments, as if Steve was a—well, he wasn’t, and he always corrected Stark when he addressed him as “darling” or “sweetheart”. It was clear that Stark, an engaged man, was romancing him, though Steve didn't know why, nor how Natasha condoned it, let alone understood Stark's behavior. Maybe the obscene amount of money Stark spent on her made up for it.

Steve wasn't blind. After the Serum, his eyesight and hearing had improved to the very peak of human abilities. He could listen for a pin dropping in a crowded room and triangulate its location based on that; he could see and dodge a bullet through heavy rainfall. Of course he had noticed Stark in his spectacular unsubtleness. In the one mandated therapy session he’d been to before refusing to go along with that mumbo-jumbo, a lady had clung to his hand and earnestly tried to explain that in these overwhelmingly new surroundings, an absence of surety and the resulting feelings of confusion and destabilization were to be expected. That he shouldn't try to block out new experiences, but embrace them. Steve resented her deeply for intimating that he was incapable of coping. His choice _not_ to react to certain things, and preference for the way of life he'd grown up with, was commonsense. It was a lot easier to disregard distractions and focus on the mission. The resolve which had served him so well during the war was just as useful bringing his mind to bear on more important things than Antonio Stark's strange mannerisms.

And so sometimes, Steve pretended not to see.

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know if you feel this fic needs more tags - I will be happy to add them, as well as any warnings that you think should be there.


End file.
